Land Tenure in Archaic Sparta 131
To this apparently compelling objection, there is, in fact, an answer. It
does not matter whether the decline in population that took place between 479
and 418 was just over 51 percent or just under 74 percent. Either way, it was
too dramatic to be explained in terms of the process described by Aristotle.
For this to have happened, there had to have been something else at work,
something much more dramatic, something other than a gradual concentra-
tion of property, and we know what it was.^22 In the period stretching from 480
to 460, the Spartans suffered severe losses. Two hundred ninety-eight died at
Thermopylae in 480, as we have seen, and another ninety-one lost their lives
at Plataea the following year (Hdt. 9.70). There may have been losses when
Leotychides campaigned in Thessaly not long thereafter (6.72), and there were
surely serious losses at Tegea and Dipaea, in the 460s, when the Spartans faced
exceedingly difficult odds in battling their own allies (9.35, Isoc. 6.99).
Even more to the point, however, in 465, there was a severe earthquake
and there were aftershocks in Laconia (Thuc. 1.101.2, 128.1, 2.27.2, 3.54.5,
4.56.2). The epicenter appears to have been in the vicinity of Sparta. We are
told that these seismic events left only five houses standing at Lacedaemon
(Plut. Cim. 16.4–5, Cic. D e div. 1.112, Pliny NH 2.191, Ael. VH 6.7.2, Polyaen.
1.41.3), and Diodorus Siculus (11.63, 15.66.4), almost certainly following
Ephorus of Cumae, asserts that more than twenty thousand Lacedaemonians,
including a majority of the Spartiates, lost their lives—many of them when
their homes collapsed on them. In the aftermath, he tells us, there were “few”
Spartiates left, and the city of Sparta was “bereft of men.” Among those who
died were, we are told, the ephebes in their very late teens. If we assume, first,
that women and small children were more likely to be in their homes when
the earthquakes struck, as seems highly likely, and, second, that Spartans were
reluctant to accept within their ranks half-breeds fathered by citizens on helot
mothers, as seems probable, the earthquakes are apt for a time to have affected
fertility as well.^23
If my intuition in this last regard is correct, the resulting shortage of eligi-
ble Spartiate women would help explain a phenomenon unprecedented as far
as we can tell: to wit, the sudden appearance in our sources of children, born
to Spartan fathers of some prominence in the first two decades after the earth-
quakes, who were classified as móthakes rather than as prospective citizens
and reared in the agō ́gē without being guaranteed admission into the ranks of
the hómoıoı—some of whom were, nonetheless, admitted and later rose to
high rank. There is good reason to suppose that Gylippus and Lysander, who